No Fixed Fruit to Hold

Taixu glosses each of the four fruits by its plain meaning before showing how the sūtra empties it: a stream-enterer has only "entered the stream" of the noble path in name, since there is, in truth, no fixed person who enters and no fixed sense-realm entered; a once-returner is named for "going once to the heavens and returning once to the human world" before their outflows are exhausted, though no such coming-and-going has a solid ground; a non-returner "no longer comes" to be reborn in the realm of desire, though there was never a fixed realm to come to in the first place; an arhat has ended rebirth, slain the thieves of affliction, and become worthy of offerings — yet Taixu stresses "there is in truth no fixed thing called arhat" at all. The moment any of the four privately thinks "I have attained this," that thought alone reintroduces a self to be congratulated — and self, person, being, and lifespan all reappear together.

Subhūti then turns the teaching on himself, in the sūtra's most personal moment so far. The Buddha has publicly named him foremost among arhats in the "concentration of non-contention" (無諍三昧) — the deepest freedom from inner and outer friction — and foremost in delighting in the quiet, secluded practice named 阿蘭那. Yet Subhūti insists he holds no private thought "I am this foremost one." Taixu's summary line for the whole section is exact: every dharma is simply as it is; acting without a fixed actor, abiding without a fixed abode, and attaining without a fixed attainer, is itself the supreme teaching the Tathāgata calls "buddha-dharma, no buddha-dharma." The instant a thought of "I have gotten something" stirs, it falls back into a bounded, dualistic frame — and what was boundless is bounded once again.

Taixu heads off an obvious worry: elsewhere the scriptures describe the Buddha, in a past life before the buddha Dīpaṃkara, receiving the prediction of his future buddhahood after ages of practice — so did he not attain something there? What Dīpaṃkara spoke and what the future Buddha heard, Taixu answers, were both only language, with no fixed essence behind either; giving and receiving a prediction is itself just more of the "no giver, no gift" pattern already taught. He briefly names the tradition's four kinds of pure land — one shared by ordinary and noble beings together, one for those still using skillful means, one adorned without limit by undefiled wisdom, and the formless "land of dharma-nature" that is simply reality itself — to make the point that "adorning a buddha-land" was never a matter of decorating scenery; a bodhisattva's own nature is originally pure land already, and any visible adornment undertaken to guide others is offered without being clung to as a fixed accomplishment.

The section's most famous line — "give rise to a mind that dwells nowhere at all" — gets Taixu's most personal aside in this fascicle. He recalls that when the Fifth Patriarch, Hongren, first expounded exactly this line to Huineng in the middle of the night, Huineng was awakened on the spot and cried out five times in a row: "How could I have known that self-nature is originally pure in itself! How could I have known that self-nature is originally beyond birth and death! How could I have known that self-nature is originally complete in itself! How could I have known that self-nature is originally beyond all wavering! How could I have known that self-nature can give rise to the ten thousand things!" The closing image, of a body as vast as Mount Sumeru, king of mountains, makes the same point in miniature: the mountain never regards its own height as height — and it is exactly this not-clinging that lets Subhūti call it, and the Buddha's own dharma-body, truly great.

Taixu lets the arithmetic build in stages, the way the text itself does: first, the grains of sand in a single Ganges — already uncountable; then as many Ganges Rivers as there are grains in that one river; then the grains of sand in every one of those rivers combined. The number is not meant to be grasped, only to dwarf the imagination — and then the sūtra asks Subhūti to imagine that same incomprehensible number of entire billion-world universes, each filled edge to edge with the seven treasures and given away. Even that, Taixu says, remains merit with an edge to it, because material giving — however vast — is still finite by nature; it can only ever purchase the bounded, worldly rewards of gods and humans.

Passing on even four lines of this sūtra outweighs it, he explains, because the two kinds of giving aim at entirely different things. Material giving, however immeasurable, ends in the giver and receiver both remaining exactly what they were. Someone who takes this teaching to heart sees their own nature and becomes a buddha; someone who then hears it from them and takes it to heart does the same — and every being brought to that seeing is freed without limit. Merit measured against something boundless is itself boundless, the way merit measured against a finite gift, however large, can never be more than finite.

Taixu names the wider assembly the verse only gestures at with "gods, humans, and asuras": the eight kinds of non-human beings said to protect the dharma — gods of the desire, form, and formless realms; nāga water-spirits; yakṣa sky-spirits; gandharva fragrance-eating musicians; asura the "not-quite-gods" whose merit resembles a god's without a god's virtue; garuḍa golden-winged birds who feed on nāgas; kiṃnara the "not-quite-humans" with a single horn; and mahoraga, the great serpent-spirits of the earth. Every one of them, he says, is drawn to venerate wherever even four lines of this teaching are spoken — the same reverence owed to a stūpa housing the Buddha's own relics, or a shrine holding his image.

The reasoning, for Taixu, is simple and direct: this sūtra is what every buddha of the ten directions and three times comes forth from, so to revere the Buddha genuinely is to revere this teaching. Wherever it is held, read, and recited, that place stands exactly as if the Buddha himself were present there, together with his foremost disciples such as Mañjuśrī and Śāriputra — not as a figure of speech, Taixu insists, but because the teaching itself is what makes a buddha a buddha. The sūtra outranks any relic; the person who carries it is, in that carrying, made rare and venerable too.